|
For Kurdish Girls, a Painful Ancient
Ritual in Iraqi Kurdistan
29.12.2008
By Amit R. Paley
|
|
|
The
Widespread Practice of Female Circumcision in Iraq's
North Highlights The Plight of Women in a Region
Often Seen as More Socially Progressive.
December
29, 2008
TUZ KHURMATU, Iraq-Kurdistan region, —
Sheelan Anwar Omer, a shy 7-year-old Kurdish girl,
bounded into her neighbor's house with an ear-to-ear
smile, looking for the party her mother had
promised.
There was no celebration. Instead, a local woman
quickly locked a rusty red door behind Sheelan, who
looked bewildered when her mother ordered the girl
to remove her underpants. Sheelan began to whimper,
then tremble, while the women pushed apart her legs
and a midwife raised a stainless-steel razor blade
in the air. "I do this in the name of Allah!" she
intoned.
As the midwife sliced off part of Sheelan's
genitals, the girl let out a high-pitched wail heard
throughout the neighborhood. As she carried the
sobbing child back home, Sheelan's mother smiled
with pride. |
Sheelan's Circumcision
A seven-year-old girl is taken by her mother to be
circumcised in Kurdish Iraq, where more than 60
percent of women have undergone the traditional and
controversial procedure. |
"This is the practice of
the Kurdish people for as long as anyone can
remember," said the mother, Aisha Hameed, 30, a
housewife in this ethnically mixed town about 100
miles north of Baghdad. "We don't know why we do it,
but we will never stop because Islam and our elders
require it."
Kurdistan is the only known part of Iraq --and one
of the few places in the world--where female
circumcision is widespread. More than 60 percent of
women in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq have been
circumcised, according to a study conducted this
year. In at least one Kurdish territory, 95 percent
of women have undergone the practice, which human
rights groups call female genital mutilation.
The practice, and the Kurdish parliament's refusal
to outlaw it, highlight the plight of women in a
region with a reputation for having a more
progressive society than the rest of Iraq. Advocates
for women point to the increasing frequency of honor
killings against women and female self-immolations
in Kurdistan this year as further evidence that
women in the area still face significant obstacles,
despite efforts to raise public awareness of
circumcision and violence against women.
"When the Kurdish people were fighting for our
independence, women participated as full members in
the underground resistance," said Pakshan Zangana,
who heads the women's committee in the Kurdish
parliament. "But now that we have won our freedom,
the position of women has been pushed backwards and
crimes against us are minimized."
Zangana has been lobbying for a law in Kurdistan, a
semiautonomous region with its own government, that
would impose jail terms of up to 10 years on those
who carry out or facilitate female circumcision. But
the legislation has been stalled in parliament for
nearly a year,www.ekurd.net
because of what women's
advocates believe is reluctance by senior Kurdish
leaders to draw international public attention to
the little-noticed tradition.
The Kurdish region's minister of human rights,
Yousif Mohammad Aziz, said he didn't think the issue
required action by parliament. "Not every small
problem in the community has to have a law dealing
with it," he said.
The practice of female circumcision is extremely
rare in the Arab parts of Iraq, according to women's
groups. They say it is not clear why the practice --
common in some parts of Africa and the Middle East
-- became popular with Iraqi Kurds but not Iraqi
Arabs.
Supporters of female circumcision said the practice,
which has been a ritual in their culture for
countless generations, is rooted in sayings they
attribute to the prophet Muhammad, though the
accuracy of those sayings is disputed by other
Muslim scholars. The circumcision is performed by
women on women, and men are usually not involved in
the procedure. In the case of Sheelan, her mother
informed her father that she was going to have the
circumcision performed, but otherwise, he played no
role.
Kurds who support circumcising girls say the
practice has two goals: It controls a woman's sexual
desires, and it makes her spiritually clean so that
others can eat the meals she prepares.
"I would not eat food from the hands of someone who
did not have the procedure," said Hurmet Kitab, a
housewife who said she was 91 years old.
Kitab, who lives in the village of Kalar in
Kurdistan's eastern Germian area, where female
circumcision is prevalent, has had the procedure
done on herself and all her daughters. When asked if
she would have her 10-month-old granddaughter Saya
circumcised, Kitab said "Of course" and explained
that the procedure is painless.
"They just cut off a little bit," she said, flicking
her finger at the top part of a key, which she then
dropped on the floor.
Women's rights groups in Kurdistan are working
eagerly to change the perception that the procedure
is harmless and that it is required under Islam.
They go to villages in rural areas where the
practice is most ingrained and tell women and
religious leaders of the physical and psychological
damage the circumcision can cause. Health experts
say the procedure can result in adverse medical
consequences for women,www.ekurd.net
including infections,
chronic pain and increased risks during childbirth.
Ghamjeen Shaker, a 13-year-old from the Kurdish
capital of Erbil, said she is still traumatized from
the day she was circumcised. She sits with her legs
clenched together and her hands clasped tightly on
her lap, as if protecting herself from another
operation. Indeed, Shaker says she sometimes dreams
that the midwife who circumcised her is coming back
to perform the procedure again.
She was 5 when her mother sent her out to buy
parsley and then locked her in the front yard of
their home with six other girls. "I knew something
bad was going to happen, but I didn't know exactly
where they were going to cut," she recalled. "My
family just kept saying, don't worry, this is a
social custom we have been doing forever."
"They pinned me to the ground, and I just cried and
cried," said Shaker, who spoke barely above a
whisper. "I was just so astonished. But now I
realize that they want to prevent women from living
their lives normally."
Her mother, Shukria Ismaeel Jarjees, a 38-year-old
housewife, said she was forced by her relatives and
elderly women in the community to have her daughter
circumcised. "I made a huge mistake, and now my
daughter is always complaining of pain in her
pelvis," Jarjees said. Her eyes began to fill with
tears. "I now advise my daughters to never
circumcise their children."
Shaker hopes to become a social worker focusing on
women's issues, in particular other girls
traumatized by female circumcision.
"I want to make sure the world understands they
cannot silence girls like this," she said.
Susan Faqi Rasheed, president of the Irbil branch of
the Kurdistan Women's Union, said that even in the
cosmopolitan capital, as many as a third of young
girls are circumcised. "When the Kurds hold on to
something, they hold on to it strongly," she said.
"So now they hold to Islam more than the Arabs."
One of the religious leaders who have been less
vocal in demanding female circumcisions is Hama
Ameen Abdul Kader Hussein, preacher at the Grand
Mosque of Kalar and head of the clergymen's union in
Germian. Previously, he preached that female
circumcision was required. Now he says it is
optional, which Hussein believes has caused the
area's rate of female circumcision to drop from 100
percent to about 50 percent.
"If there is any harm in this exercise," he said,
"we should not do it."
Despite the outreach efforts, a study of women in
more than 300 Kurdish villages by WADI, a German
nongovernmental group that advocates against female
circumcision, found that 62 percent underwent the
procedure.
In Tuz Khurmatu, the most famous practitioner of
female circumcision is Maharoub Juwad Nawchas, a
40-year-old midwife with traditional Kurdish tattoos
covering her chin. She learned from her mother, who
used to perform the procedure for free, though
Nawchas now charges 4,000 Iraqi dinars, or just
under $3.50, because her husband is disabled and
can't work. She has circumcised about 30 girls a
year for the past two decades.
On the day she circumcised Sheelan,www.ekurd.net
the midwife began the
ritual by laying down an empty white potato sack to
serve as her working area. AK-47 assault rifles hung
from the wall of the dingy concrete house, and
watermelons rested below.
When Sheelan entered the room, her mother, Nawchas
and a local woman placed the girl on a tiny wooden
stool the size of a brick. The midwife applied
yellow antiseptic to her pelvic area and injected
her with lignocaine, an anesthetic. Little children
peeked through the window to see what the noise was
about.
"It's all right, it's all right," Sheelan's mother
whispered, as the girl screamed so loudly her face
turned red. She tried to bunch up her skirt over her
pelvis and shield the area with her hand, but the
women jerked her arms back.
Then Nawchas uttered the prayer, made a swift cut,
and immediately moved the girl over a pile of ashes
to control the bleeding.
The entire ritual took less then 10 minutes.
Back home, Sheelan lay on the floor, unable to move
or talk much. She clutched a bag filled with orange
soda and candy and barely said anything except that
she was in pain.
But she became more animated when asked whether it
was worth it to have the operation so her friends
and neighbors would be comfortable eating food she
prepared. "I would do anything not to have this
pain, even if meant they would not eat from my
hands," she rasped slowly.
"I just wish that I could be the way I was before
the procedure," she said.
Copyright, respective author or news agency,
washingtonpost com
Top |
Kurd Net
does not take credit for and is not responsible for the content of news
information on this page
|
®
